There was a pill in my palm. It was the size of a pencil eraser, almost so small I wouldn't need water, round and smooth and the color of orange sherbet. Baby aspirin. The pill's name was Flexeril and flexibility was primarily what I wanted. A little something to make my spine arch, to bend my lips up at the corners. For once it wasn't an escape I was after, more like an enhancement. Since the move and the separation from my ex and with the increased volume of facetime with my boy, things were looking pretty rosy for me. But a little vacation couldn't hurt. I'd spent the night before making some time, laying some claim. He was napping now, just an hour he'd said, leaving me to contemplate the envelope of pills in my hand. I'd smuggled them from my dad's medicine cabinet in one of those tiny paper envelopes they package double-edged razorblades in. I'll take this one, and if it hasn't worked by the time he's awake, I'll take another. This was a good plan and they were only 10mg, so I didn't think much of it as I dropped the tablet onto my tongue and washed it down with a sip of absinthe. The taste was familiar but I couldn't place it, and the burn of the liquor washed it away before I had a chance to try very hard. I always relish the first few seconds after I eat something. My mind likes to give me flashes of an allergic reaction, a panic attack, authority figure discovery and all the other potential hazards of what I just did. But it's always too late, and I have to shelve those feelings before they get out of hand. Besides, I'd taken this before, and a little relaxation never hurt anyone.

Sixty minutes later. I was halfway through the two dozen email messages my ex had seen fit to grace me with over the past three days. I stood up, walked from the computer to the door and back, felt nothing. Not a wobble, not a ghost of flutter around my head that would indicate that I was anything less than sober. I was disappointed. Should've felt something by now, especially on an empty stomach. But no matter. I had six of these darling things, and in the space of another minute I'd downed another one with another sip of absinthe, and then another for good measure. Might as well live it up. While I waited for the inevitable post-absinthe queasiness to wear off, I disconnected the computer and turned my chair to stand up. Then it hit me, in the space of just a few minutes. I felt it now, that first pill slowly starting to come on. And I'd just taken a second. But no matter. I was safe here, everyone was asleep but us, and I meant it when I'd said that I wanted to be flat out for a few hours. 

My first few tries at waking Nicholas were without much result, though I'd told him the story of how I thought I'd doubled my dose unintentionally. In the end I did a little more pacing to be absolutely sure that I was feeling it. Oh, I was. Increasingly so. I'd caught a chill from somewhere that prickled my skin. Walking went fine until I stopped, and then I had to double-step to catch myself. I was amused with this for awhile until the bed started to look like a good idea, as I'd turned the electric blanket on back when I'd taken the first pill. I managed to sit without hurting anything and took one more swallow of the absinthe for good measure. I was sliding inevitably down and pretty soon I was oozing onto my back, studying the ceiling, shifting to find just the right position. It took a few minutes to get settled in but I found what I was looking for, stretched out on my back with my skirt pulled over my feet, my head pillowed on my crimson bathrobe, one hand on my stomach and the other dangling off the edge of the bed. Drift, Daddy he advised from the couch, and with my eyes half-closed, I did.

I floated for some time before my goosebumped skin prompted me to drag the bathrobe out from under my head and try to spread it over me. It was becoming very difficult to move and I had to force my arm to obey. It wasn't that I was unable to move, only that not-moving felt so good, and it seemed such a shame to bother my nicely liquefied muscles with coordinated motion. A few minutes later the bed creaked and bent under Nicholas' weight as he crawled onto the bed next to me, stretching out on his side. I could barely see him through my slitted eyes, so I concentrated instead on his voice and his hands. Liquid Daddy. So pretty. His fingers peeled the robe down to my waist and the chill increased. I could barely manage a shiver as he reached down, pulling up my shirt and smoothing his hand over my stomach and my ribs to my nipples, pinching and pulling, shaping them with excruciating slowness and care. It felt amazing, but I could barely bring myself to squirm. I managed to turn my head into his shoulder as his hand shifted from one nipple to the other before tracking down, sliding under the waistband of both my skirt and my briefs. I have no idea how long I'd been hard by this point, but it only got worse when I felt the heat of his grip around me. So fucking hard, he purred into my ear, the tickle of his breath as much of a tease as the rest of him, and his hand moved faster. He knows exactly what I like, how I like it, how long, how hard, how crazy various things make me, and he went through several combinations before stopping entirely. What do you want, Daddy? I would've fucked his hand raw if I could've moved. As it was I could barely whisper More at him, the first word I'd managed at least a half hour. He stroked me once or twice. Please? I debated repeating after him but repeated myself instead, and at my second request he started in again and didn't stop until I moaned once and pulsed in his hand, coating his fingers with my come.

He rested with me for a few minutes, leaving kisses on my cheeks and my eyelids that burned like embers. I felt as if I must've been carved out of ice, I was so cold. I wasn't really shivering, which surprised me. Even when he dragged the rest of the robe off me and pushed my shirt up to my chin. The skirt is loose, a black polyester A-shaped thing with an elastic waistband that starts around my hipbones and finishes at the tops of my feet. He tugged it down to just above the rise of my pubic hair and leaned down to kiss me, his mouth lingering over the points of ribs and hipbones, again teasing my nipples. It was as relaxing as it was stimulating and I was lulled further down to that place where Here and There overlap, finding the scene was much the same in both places. A bed. Dim light. Two boys. He hooked his fingers under the bottommost edge of my ribcage and lifted, rocking me a little. The sensation of his fingertips so near to under my skin unnerved me somewhat, as did the rasp of the side of his thumbnail over the right side of my chest, along the line of my ribs, over my nipple. The sound was almost like a tear and the pain was white-hot and immediate. I was sure he'd cut me, that he'd palmed a razor somehow when I wasn't looking. I shifted my sight over There and found that it was true, that my chest was dotted with red from his blade, but that Here I was just scratched. No sharps, just fingernail. It pleased me, thrilled me that he was giving me this sensation that I'd been craving for some time now. He listens when I talk, takes passing "I wish I.." and "I want to.." conversational statements to be Real Live Wishes and does his best to fulfill them when he can. I felt safe and comfortable with this right up to the point where he kissed my ear and asked Can I open you? 

My initial reaction was a resounding no, one that never really made it to my mouth to be spoken. I was too busy trying to picture what that would be like, to be that far under the knife of a master, but I was cautious about greenlighting it. I tried to voices my concerns as best I could with my limited vocabulary.What if it...I can't die now. Tonight. I mean... I was failing miserably at effective protesting. He muted me with a kiss and moved his hand to my stomach, touching his nail to the skin and slicing in and down. The pain opened my eyes and arched my back and I made a strangled sort of cry. I was cold, so fucking cold, everywhere but my stomach. The sting settled into an angry throbbing and the warmth rose into the line, trickled down my sides like the blood that was flowing There. I was squirming by now, trying to coordinate my hands to push at him, lips forming Nicholas and You can't and I never said 'yes'. Before I could say anything his fingers were exploring the edges of this new pain, dipping inside, stirring me. The sensation was incredible, unlike anything else I'd ever felt. The closest I can compare it to is having cramps from air or bad food, an angry pressure or a shift you can't control. His fingers were shallow at first and then deeper, exploring the new textures I'd hidden from him and from everyone else, exposing new pieces of me to the air. He made a predator's noise in the back of his throat and withdrew his fingers long enough to draw a sort of pinwheel shape over my stomach and down my sides. Then he raised his hand to touch his mouth, smearing his lips with my blood before sucking at his finger and relocating one of my hands to my stomach. I wasn't ready to feel much of what he'd uncovered and I tried to shield the wound from him, to hold myself closed as best as I could, still trying to protest. He ignored me and moved down a bit, his tongue touching my knuckles and moving on in favor of the spaces between them, driving his tongue into the slit in my stomach. It was obscene, unreal. It was perfect. 

He did it again and again, I don't know how many times. This part gets hazy as I began to lose cohesion. I could feel the blood loss, how sticky my hand was, the slowly spreading puddle of warmth under me where I lay. I wasn't any warmer myself, though I still wasn't shivering. I didn't develop tunnel vision or anything like that, but my breathing was altering, becoming less frequent and less deep. I was perfectly happy to let the time whittle away between breaths, raptly watching the blond boy in the bed move his mouth and his hands over me, smearing us both in red. He was so beautiful and so was I, the room was perfect, I was exactly where I wanted to be. The center of his attention. The midpoint of everything with him at my helm, driving me, pulling the heat and the life out of me and for the first time I saw how very easy it would be to die. To simply not take that next breath. To focus my attention and what was left of my energy entirely on being There rather than Here. I wondered what it would feel like, if Here would flicker and gutter out like a candle, or if it'd flare and then die out like unplugging a television, or if it'd just, stop, and there'd be nothing but There, or nothing at all until the light came again and I was walking toward it. 

Don't faint, Daddy. Come on. His voice drifted up to me wherever I was and he patted at my cheeks hard enough to startle me into sucking in my next breath, pulling me back down into the Here. Now that I was back he wasted no time in setting out bait to entice me to stay, and his hand slid back into my crotch, finding me hard again. My attention was back on him, this time the him that was Here, and by now I was able to move a little more, letting my legs drift open as he settled himself between them. His free hand was rubbing at my thigh, moving up the inside of my leg and pushing my knee up, licking his fingers wet before sliding them along the crack of my ass. I couldn't have stopped him if I'd wanted to, and the drugs were working more in his favor than mine as his finger slid into me without much resistance. This new sensation blended with the others, altered them separately and together, and when he took me into his mouth my back arched again, pushing myself deeper into his throat. Here was the warmth I wanted, the touch I was craving. I loved having him like this, a part of me inside him and a part of him inside me. It was sewn together with the stinging in my chest, the deeper ominous ache in my stomach. My hips moved without my direction, alternating between up toward his mouth and down toward his hand. Not much time passed before I came, my ragged moan almost drowned out by his growls, feeling his fingernails in my hip as he tried to hold me still with moderate success.

I was still coming down when he dragged his mouth away from me and licked his lips, turning his head and biting suddenly into my hip. This hurt more than anything else he'd done to me and it almost made me shriek, writhing uncontrollably. After a hard pull he let go, nursed at the mark for a minute before moving to my outstretched arm, brushing a kiss over the inside of my wrist before biting again, dragging another embarrassing cry out of me. I was overwhelmed with sensation, shaking, awed by his control, by the extent of the pain he gave me, by how quickly he could render me helpless and willing to do anything for him, be anything for him be it his pet or his whore. Turn over, Daddy. This was an impossibility, it had to be. There was no way I could manage that, even though I was sprawled so that it would've been pretty easy to do. The only thing I could think of was what if I spill?. I had the idea that the slit in my stomach was somewhere between three and six inches long and I wasn't sure how open it was, but I was fairly sure that if I wasn't careful that I'd end up facedown in the former contents of my abdominal cavity. And while I was somewhat certain that I could survive being gently disemboweled, I wasn't sure if I wanted the memory of how that would feel. Here. I'll help you. He took hold of my ankles and knees, rolling me gently onto my side and then onto my stomach, arranging me carefully. I couldn't help him much, I was too concerned with making sure my hand was over my stomach. Just in case. I had a short time to work out that I was fairly safe being facedown and that I wasn't in much danger of losing anything except more blood. While I was getting myself adjusted to this change of position, Nicholas swarmed up behind me, twisting fingernail and blade over my ankle and the back of my calf, opening new mouths to kiss, feeling his tongue moving up the back of my thigh.

Here again it fragments, crystallized, moments held before the light. Bloodstained glass window pain. I remember him spreading me open, the sharpness of his fingernails as he drew long scratches inside me, pushing deep and then deeper still, finding a place that made me shudder and working it just long enough to send me into as much motion as I could manage, moaning and half-blinded by my own hair, trying to pick it from my eyes and my mouth. I remember laying Here as his hand stilled inside me, his other reaching under my hips to my cock again as my hand circled my stomach, feeling the ghost of pain from There, dimly wondering how my fingers couldn't feel the seam and then wondering if maybe I did feel it after all. I remember him speaking to me though his words have since been lost, his hands moving in unison, how I was helpless to stay quiet or still at that point. I remember the cold, always the cold, everywhere save for the burning of my stomach and anywhere he was touching me, how that burn started to take shape inside me, brought on by the insistence of his fingers. I remember the glow, the way it expanded and contracted, becoming brighter and stronger and more solid. I remember slumping onto the bed, breathless and twitching when he finally pulled away, exchanged his fingers for his cock, the way I arched my back to take him in, the way the burning increased, how good he felt, the spreading warmth. I remember his hands on me, the warmth of his breath against my ear as he hissed you're mine. Pretty little slut. Mine. Mine. Mine... The choking pressure. The heat. The friction of my cock against the bed. The sharp intake of his breath before he hissed to me. Take it. The frenzy that followed. Writhing. Snarling. Biting me. Hurting me. He was coming and I was coming and he was etching himself onto me, into me, taking me over, dragging me under. Making me his.

Time stretched out. I drifted. Maybe I finally passed out. I remember him withdrawing, moving away, the paralysis as the cold hit me all over again. How I couldn't stop shaking. He tried to cover me up though I was laying the wrong way on the bed and he had to give up and hold me instead, stroking my hair back from my face. Someone's coming to sew you up, Daddy. Okay? It's going to hurt. I knew that he meant There rather than Here, though I wouldn't be surprised if I was bleeding somewhere, either from his fingernail or his teeth. The ache in my stomach had dulled since the activity had slowed down but after a minute or two it started up again, this time with sharper twinges of brighter pain that I took to be the needle, sharp and curved and made for this kind of work, remaking the division between my inside and the outside world. It stopped after awhile. I drifted again. ....something for the pain...Another needle prick and I found new interest in the ceiling, the ache dropping away from me, becoming irrelevant. After some more drifting, a mostly unsuccessful attempt at laying in bed correctly and what must've been one of the most comical trips to the bathroom ever, I was tucked into bed the right way this time, buried under four layers of blankets. The sudden addition of heat to the drugs both old and new calmed me and I was nearly asleep in seconds, the planes of Here and There blending into a single space occupied by the two of us, and then even that fading out with my last conscious breath.